“Porn addiction” is now a cover story for outright creepers

My usual response to Cary Tennis’s advice column at Salon is to read it, maybe chat with friends for a second about it, shaking our heads in disapproval all the way, and move on. But today, woof. I really feel the need to step in. Sometimes I think people write Tennis because they know they should be writing Prudie or Dan Savage, but they fear getting good advice, because they know in their hearts the right thing to do, and they’re not there yet. And Tennis will happily keep steering them down the wrong path.

Before I even start to quote today’s letter, I want to point out that Tennis’s answer is based on a completely incorrect assumption, that a man who retains sexual desire for other women after commiting monogamously to one can properly be considered mentally ill. He not only accepts at face value the concept of “porn addiction”, but also everything else the letter writer rolls up into it, such as her belief that his “illness” causes him to look at other women and that masturbation itself is a manifestation of his “illness”—that if he was healthy, all of his sexual energy would be directed to her and her alone. Accepting that this is an illness is all kinds of messed up. What it is would be better labeled as “normal”, “human”, “healthy”, and “get over it”. The recently released DSM-V not only rejected attempts to get “sex addiction” or “porn addiction” listed, but in fact delisted the closest thing to it, “hypersexuality”, putting it in the index. They should have dropped it completely, but I guess there’s still enough Christianists in the therapy world with power to keep some kind of symblic nod to the idea that being horny makes you mentally ill. Instead of looking to what the scientific establishment has to say on this, Tennis instead directs this letter writer towards anti-porn hysteria, some of it emanating from our friend Naomi Wolf. He even suggests some sex-negative therapists.

Now, as will become clear, I do think a lot of men look at too much porn and have all sorts of weird sexual issues. I don’t, however, think they’re mentally ill. I think they just grew up with a giant heaping of male privilege and its naughty little cousin, anxious masculinity, and they’re drawn to porn not because they’re horny so much as it soothes them to see women being put in their place, over and over again. This guy is probably one of them. But the answer is not to shut down porn use, masturbation, or sexual attraction outside of relationships. Sex isn’t the problem. Male domination i s, and there are plenty of guys out there who can be horny and respectful of women at the same time. A little experience makes it easier to suss out who is who.

Now, there’s a lot of red flags in this letter that Tennis should have noticed.

I am 20 and have been living with my boyfriend, who is much older than I am, for over two years.

Red flag #1: The letter writer was dating a much-older man when she was underage. This already should be sending up missiles of WTF, enough for you to start crafting a response that involves, “Dump him, and find someone your own age, instead of a grown man who trawls high schools looking for dates.

Previous to being with me, he was single for five years and he watched porn daily. Soon after I moved in, I discovered he was into teenage porn. I asked him to stop watching it, and he promised he would. A few months later, I found he was still watching it daily. He told me later that he would sneak it while I was in the other room and masturbate to it. I explained to him that aside from it being creepy, I also considered it unfaithful.

Red flag #2: He was single for five years until he talked an underage girl with probably no experience dating prior to him into being his girlfriend. Red flag #3: His sexual fantasies center completely around girls that are below the legal age of consent, which his girlfriend likely was when they met.

I did not understand why my body wasn’t enough to satisfy him. I was willing to give him sex whenever he wanted, yet he chose to relieve himself to other girls.

Red flag #4: The low self-esteem, passivity, and submissiveness evident in talking about sex as a matter of a woman offering her body up to a man to “relieve” him. It imagines sex as being similar to a man using a woman as a human toilet, instead of sex being a mutual exchange of pleasure. We can begin to see why this girl was perhaps easy pickings for the kind of creepy guy who treats the playground like it’s Match.com.

Naturally, they go through all the bullshit ropes: Him pretending not to look, her spying, him pretending to go to therapy (or actually going, but not listening, because hey, sex addiction isn’t a disease), her trying to clamp down harder. In fact, she gets completely out of control.

I also decided that keeping him away from triggers would help him not crave it as much (he agreed). Whenever we would rent movies for example, we would choose ones without nudity in them. I also went as far as refusing to go to the beach with him (because I knew that if we went he would be checking out young girls and may even have to masturbate to them later on).

By placing these limits on his behavior however, I am worried because I adversely made him hypersensitive to seemingly nonsexual things such as a girl wearing short shorts. Now that he is deprived of nudity he has admitted to becoming very aroused by things that were formerly not very arousing, since that is all he has access to.

Ugh, only 20 years old and already she’s acting like the fun-free wife-as-mother whose job is to place “restrictions” on her naughty son-lover. I think I just made myself ill. Without intervention, this young woman is on a highway to an embittered middle-aged woman who writes screeching blog posts about how the evil feminists are ruining it for other women with their slutting it up, all to avoid admitting what the real problem is, which is that she has low self-esteem and hooked up with a creep because he was the first taker.

Here is what’s really going on: This young woman met her boyfriend, who is much older, when she was in high school. She was at least 17, and possibly younger. He is one of those creepy fucks who likes teenage girls, because he has power and control issues. Now that she’s no longer a teenager and—gasp!—is approaching the decrepit old age where she can legally drink, she’s beginning to worry, I’m guessing correctly, that he’s losing interest. He’s not into women, just girls, and ugh, the girl he used to be with is betraying him by becoming a woman. So he’s masturbating more to barely legal porn, and checking out teenagers, most of whom are probably creeped out, which is just another ugly reminder of the kind of weirdo she hooked up with. But instead of seeing this for what it is, her self-esteem is so low that she instead is getting clingy and controlling herself. The porn is a red herring. If she was in a healthy relationship with a non-creep, she might see that.

Solution: DTMFA. And after you do that, find a therapist yourself to work out your self-esteem issues. Not one of the sex-negative ones suggested by Tennis, but one who can talk you through why sex isn’t a weapon for the sexes to fight each other. Spend some time masturbating yourself, and really thinking of your body as an instrument for your pleasure, instead of an object for men to “relieve” themselves on. Monogamy is way more meaningful if it’s about two people sharing their sexualities together, instead of being your man’s one and only sperm bin. And don’t blame yourself for spending the first few years of your dating life with a creeper. You got some ugly misogynist messages as a young woman that thwarted your basic anti-creep instincts, but you’re young and you have plenty of time to right yourself and have genuinely fulfilling romantic adventures.

About the Author

Amanda Marcotte is a freelance journalist born and bred in Texas, but now living in the writer reserve of Brooklyn. She focuses on feminism, national politics, and pop culture, with the order shifting depending on her mood and the state of the nation.